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Tuesday, August 28, 2012

My summer

Dear students! I hope you had a wonderful summer and will return refreshed to the School or Institute next week. I'm looking forward to seeing you.

Judy and I spent part of the summer in the northwestern part of the USA, in the states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Judy is still in the U.S. at this moment--but right now she's in the opposite end of the country, in Maine.

Among the high points of our summer was the week we spent in rural Idaho. We visited friends who own a farm. One day they invited us to come with them as they herded cattle from one pasture to another:

A few days later we were in Oregon. There I spent four days at the Waterfront Blues Festival and saw some of my favorite musicians:

I was able to photograph Charlie Musselwhite (large picture above, with his attache case of harmonicas). In the EGE class, we will be using a couple of his songs during the school year. In the row of photos below, from left to right: Booker T. Jones, whose career goes back nearly fifty years; Kid Ramos (here performing with the Mannish Boys); and Jim Wallace (here performing with the Suburban Slim Band). All of these bands were on one of the four festival stages on Portland's beautiful Willamette River waterfront:

But for now I'm glad to be back home in Elektrostal, sitting at my desk with Skripachka sitting next to me as I'm getting my papers in order for the coming school year. Come and visit me here often; I'll have information here about homework, I'll post song audio files and lyrics and (when possible) videos, and I'll also try to post other useful information. For the Institute classes, I'll post the weekly schedules here, too.

For official Institute information, be sure to visit the Institute's Web site. I hear that the School will soon have an official Web site of its own.